The Thin Red Line

Inside the White House debate over Syria.

President Obama has been reluctant to use military force to contain the Syrian crisis, but the pressure is mounting for him to intervene. “All the options are horrible,” a former aide said.Credit Photograph by Jason Reed/Reuters

Just after midnight on April 25th, a Syrian medical technician who calls himself Majid Daraya was sitting at home, in the city of Daraya, five miles from the outskirts of Damascus, when he heard an explosion. He ran outside, and, on the southern horizon, he saw a blue haze. “I’ve never seen a blue explosion before,” he remembers thinking. Seconds later came another blast, and another blue haze. Majid, who used a pseudonym to protect his identity, told me that his city had become a violent and unpredictable place; for five months, it had been the scene of heavy combat between forces loyal to the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the rebels who have been fighting for more than two years to drive him from power.

Within a few minutes, Majid said, his eyes began to burn, and he felt sick to his stomach. He decided to walk to the local hospital, where, as an anesthesia specialist, he spent most of his daytime hours. When he arrived, dozens of people were streaming in, choking, vomiting, crying, saliva bubbling out of their mouths. About a hundred and thirty people were treated for similar symptoms; ten of them, Majid said, were in “dangerous” condition, though none died. The victims were suffering from chemical poisoning, but there wasn’t much that the doctors could do except try to alleviate the symptoms. “We don’t have medicine to cure that kind of poisoning,” Majid said, in a telephone interview. (We had been introduced by the Syrian Support Group, a pro-opposition organization in Washington, D.C.) “The people were terrified, because no one could help them.”

On the way home, Majid saw birds and other animals—goats, chickens, stray dogs—writhing on the ground. Others were dead. “All these birds and chickens were dead around us,” he told me. “I can’t describe the fear that people felt.” A statement by the rebel-led city council said that the regime had used sarin and possibly chlorine gas. The council members held the Syrian government responsible and called on the international community to “find out the truth about the killing machine.” Majid directed me to a macabre gallery of photographs and videos, posted online by opposition leaders in Daraya. “It was poison gas,’’ he said. “It affected the birds and the animals and the humans in the same terrible way.”

Since March, there have been reports of at least four similar attacks, including one in Ateibeh, a contested area near Damascus, and one in Khan al-Assal, a town outside Aleppo. The reports indicated that the attack in Khan al-Assal had killed twenty-two people and injured forty-eight, and that the one in Ateibeh had contaminated as many as twenty-five people. Majid’s account could not be independently confirmed. An American intelligence official told me that he had learned of the purported attack, and others, by monitoring rebel Web sites. Like the other attacks, the one in Daraya was shrouded in ambiguity. What was the gas that Majid described? Was it a substance banned by international treaty, like sarin or VX? Or was it something less virulent? Had the attack been ordered by Assad, or had it been carried out by a Syrian military unit operating on its own authority? (Although the regime has accused rebels of such attacks, American officials believe that they don’t have chemical weapons.) And, if the incidents reported by Majid and other Syrians did amount to a use of chemical weapons, what could be done to prevent the next one?

On several occasions, President Obama has declared that if the regime used chemical weapons, or even prepared to use them, it would be crossing a “red line.’’ But the Administration has taken care not to make the line too sharp, referring not just to chemical weapons but to “a whole bunch” of chemical weapons, used in a “systematic” way. And though Obama has said that such attacks would be a “game changer,” he has stopped short of saying that they would be cause for military force.

Joseph Holliday, a former Army intelligence officer who has studied the conflict for the Institute for the Study of War, in Washington, suggested that the regime was attempting to use the weapons in a way that would frighten the rebels but wouldn’t cross the red line. “Assad has been extremely calculating with the use of force, increasing the levels of violence gradually, so as not to set off alarm bells,” he said. “First it was artillery. Then it was bombing. Then it was Scuds. A year ago, he wasn’t killing a hundred people a day. He’s introducing chemical weapons gradually, so we get used to them.” The attacks in March and April took place in areas that were either contested or held by the regime, and they killed relatively few people, at a time when, elsewhere in the country, a hundred people were dying every day. “If it’s not a big attack, it’s not easy to determine whether chemical weapons have been used,” a Senate aide told me. “The cloud disperses—there’s no mushroom cloud. Maybe Assad bombards the area afterward to cover up the evidence.” Indeed, some experts said that the regime was using the attacks specifically to gauge the resolve of Obama and the West. “Assad appears to be testing the tactical value of his chemical arsenal,” Gary Samore, who until February was President Obama’s chief adviser on weapons of mass destruction, said. “But he’s testing the political limits, too.”

Senior Israeli officials and Republicans in Washington, as well as British and French intelligence officials, have argued forcefully that the regime used chemical weapons. The Administration’s response has been characterized by caution, indecision, and reluctance to speak publicly about the subject. Officials said in late April that they believed chemical weapons had been used at least twice, but that they could not definitely tie the attacks to Assad. The White House said that it was not entirely clear who was in control of the weapons, leaving open the possibility that the attacks were accidental or unauthorized. “Given the stakes involved, and what we have learned from our recent experience, intelligence assessments alone are not sufficient,” the White House wrote in a letter to congressional leaders. Instead, the Administration would rely on the United Nations, which planned to send in experts to test soil and take samples from victims. Assad refused to allow the experts into the country.

A White House aide told me, “There is no question in our minds that the regime would be willing to use these weapons, is able to use these weapons, and is increasingly likely to use these weapons as things continue to go badly for them.” But, at a recent meeting at the State Department, according to a person who attended, “No one wanted to say that Assad had crossed the line, because no one wants to deal with it.” Assad’s chemical arsenal is spread across the country, much of it in populated areas; an effective military strike against it would need to be huge, and meticulously coördinated, to make sure that no toxins were released into the air or into enemy control. Samore told me, “It’s really a nightmare military scenario.’’ As the regime has traded ground with the rebels, some of Assad’s chemical weapons have been moved, and it is not clear where all of them are. “The intelligence people told us that their visibility is basically zero on some of these weapons, that we’re not going to know until after they have been used—if then,’’ the Senate aide told me.

In Syria, more than seventy thousand people have died, and three and a half million have been forced from their homes; the refugee camp across the border in Jordan is now that country’s fifth-largest city. The Administration has given the Syrian opposition more than six hundred and fifty million dollars in nonmilitary aid, but Obama has consistently opposed arming the rebels or intervening militarily on their behalf. The United States has taken a tenuous position: not deep enough to please the rebels or its allies in Europe, or to topple the regime, or to claim leadership in the war’s aftermath—but also, perhaps most important, not so deep that it can’t get out. “Here’s what we wrestle with: there are huge costs and unintended consequences that go with a military intervention that could last for many years,” Benjamin Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, told me. After the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is little appetite for a new conflict. In a recent poll by the Times and CBS News, only a quarter of respondents felt that the U.S. should take responsibility for Syria. “The country is exhausted,” a senior White House official said.

In May, 1993, four months into Bill Clinton’s first term, Peter Tarnoff, a high-ranking State Department official, told a group of reporters that the White House intended to scale back America’s global commitments. “It’s necessary to make the point that our economic interests are paramount,’’ Tarnoff said. “We simply don’t have the leverage, we don’t have the influence, the inclination to use military force. We don’t have the money to bring about positive results anytime soon.” After the briefing, the White House admonished Tarnoff to be more careful when talking to reporters.

Tarnoff wasn’t wrong, exactly; the American economy was in bad condition, and only eighteen months had passed since U.S. soldiers returned from the Gulf War against Iraq. But he was expressing an unpopular sentiment: that there was a need to reassess the role of American power in the world. After the Cold War, the U.S. enjoyed a period of almost unrivalled influence, free to intervene more or less wherever it wanted. For decades, the idea that America had limits was not often expressed in the White House briefing room.

Clinton had begun his first term determined to cash in on “the peace dividend.” But the implosion of Yugoslavia was already well under way, and the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, had turned loose his militias to ethnically cleanse large tracts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a predominantly Muslim province that was trying to secede. For more than two and a half years, as the killing accelerated, the Clinton Administration stood aloof, refusing to intercede. Marshall Harris, who oversaw Bosnia policy at the State Department in the early months of the war, told me that every day he read reports of massacre and mass rape and wondered why the United States was doing so little to help. “It was genocide, and it was relatively easily remediable through NATO action, or just letting the Bosnians arm themselves,” he said. “To listen to the Administration, it was terribly complicated, this ancient ethnic quagmire, people we don’t understand. The Administration did an excellent job of complicating it, of making it something it wasn’t.’’ Seven months into Clinton’s term, Harris resigned in protest, along with two of his colleagues.

In July, 1995, Serbian forces encircled the town of Srebrenica and killed more than seven thousand Bosnian civilians, in an area ostensibly under the protection of U.N. peacekeepers. Within days, Clinton had decided to seek the U.N.’s approval to use force in Bosnia. His motives were mixed. The war had been given extensive television coverage, and Americans were increasingly aware that an atrocity was unfolding in Europe; by then, nearly a hundred thousand civilians had been killed. After the debacle in Srebrenica, the United States would have been obliged to go into Bosnia anyway, in order to pull out the besieged U.N. peacekeepers. The NATO bombing campaign began in August, and in less than two weeks Milosevic sued for peace.

The intervention seemed to offer two lessons. The first was that the United States had become the indispensable nation, at least when it came to stopping a humanitarian disaster of the kind that occurred in Bosnia. “Only the United States can do this kind of enormous operation,” James P. Rubin, a Clinton-era official at the State Department who was involved in deliberations about the Balkans, said. “It’s not that we do it ourselves. It’s that we gather the world together to do it, parcel out the roles, make sure everybody takes certain responsibilities—the Germans do police, the French do reconstruction. If the United States doesn’t do it, then it doesn’t get done.”

The second lesson was that, in terms of domestic politics, there wasn’t much to be gained from intervening in foreign countries, and there was plenty to lose if an intervention went awry. For Gary Bass, a Princeton professor who has written about humanitarian intervention, the remarkable thing about Clinton’s taking action in Bosnia was that he did it at all. Bass’s general rule is that every time a President sends troops to save lives overseas he risks political disaster; if he stays out, even in the face of calamity, there is little downside. Clinton’s reputation suffered when an American helicopter was shot down in Somalia, and eighteen soldiers were killed, but it was undiminished when he stood by during the Rwandan genocide, in which eight hundred thousand people died. In Bosnia, he got little credit for the lives he saved. “The political price is always heavily slanted against intervention when there is no core national-security interest involved,’’ Bass said.

George W. Bush entered office with a modest, insular agenda, focussed on tax cuts and programs like No Child Left Behind. Then he, too, was derailed, by the attacks of September 11, 2001. Afterward, his Administration combined an expansive view of humanitarian intervention with the aggressive doctrine of preëmptive warfare. In his second Inaugural Address, Bush promised to “support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” The greatest test of that proposition, the invasion of Iraq, was catastrophic; whatever democratic aspirations the Iraqis had were subsumed by the anarchy that the Americans unleashed. In the first year of occupation, the U.S. brought together prominent Iraqis to form the Iraqi Governing Council—a group, intended as a fledgling government, that in practice did little more than rubber-stamp American proposals. In May, 2004, its president, Ezzedine Salim, was killed just outside the Green Zone by a suicide bomber from Al Qaeda in Iraq. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan fared little better. After twelve years, the country is run by a recalcitrant government that seems intent on enriching itself, and whose President receives bags of cash from the C.I.A. in his office while the Taliban prepare for the American withdrawal.

In 2009, with the U.S. economy in a deep recession, President Obama came into office determined to reduce America’s military role in the world, and to refocus the country’s energies toward Asia, where markets are expanding. He spent much of his first term managing the two wars that Bush left him. In Iraq, he withdrew a hundred and forty thousand American troops, leaving behind a fractured country; in Afghanistan, he ordered a surge of combat troops, only to announce eighteen months later that the U.S. would drastically cut back its commitments there. The lesson of these wars might have been that one intervention is not like another, that each carries its own risks and exigencies; in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, there were few tangible rewards. The armed force that Obama has initiated has been focussed, limited, and precise: drone attacks, the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.

In February, 2011, with the Arab Spring in its hopeful first months, the Libyan dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, moved to crush an uprising that had erupted in the coastal city of Benghazi. At first, Obama stayed out, having apparently determined that American interests in Libya were peripheral. In March, two European leaders—Nicolas Sarkozy, of France, and David Cameron, of the United Kingdom—prepared to act on their own, proposing a no-fly zone to protect civilians from what appeared to be an imminent massacre. Obama was still reluctant to get involved. Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, told her French counterpart, Gérard Araud, “You are not going to drag us into your shitty war.”

But within days, it seems, the British and the French had prodded the President into forceful action. “You have to go back fifty years in the history of the Western Alliance to find a time when Britain and France were going to go to war without the United States,’’ Rubin said. The French position, he said, was “We don’t care if we have a U.N. resolution. We’re going.” With Qaddafi’s forces closing in on Benghazi, Obama asked his military advisers whether a no-fly zone would protect the Libyan people. When they told him it would not—Qaddafi’s Army was likely to kill more people than his Air Force would—Obama instead asked the United Nations to authorize air strikes against Libyan ground forces, a much more ambitious step than Sarkozy and Cameron had proposed. “The President said that the no-fly zone was basically an empty gesture,” one of his aides told me. “So he decided to go much farther.”

By many measures, the American-led intervention in Libya was a success. A massacre was averted; a weak but largely democratic government emerged, with pro-Western leanings, even though the White House disengaged after Qaddafi’s fall. Yet the most prominent story from Libya in the past year has been not the disaster that Obama averted but the one that he did not: the murder, last September, of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, by militants in Benghazi. “It’s a weird thing: when you go in early, like Obama did, you get this kind of thanklessness—you didn’t see the massacre,’’ Bass said.

In a television appearance last week, Senator John McCain, one of the most outspoken advocates of greater American involvement in Syria, said that the U.S. should be “prepared with an international force to go in and secure these stocks of chemical and perhaps biological weapons.” However, he added, “the worst thing the United States could do right now is put boots on the ground.” McCain seems to be imagining an intervention like the one in Bosnia, or perhaps like the one in Libya—short, remote, and, at least for the Americans, bloodless. When Obama looks at Syria, his aides say, he sees something vastly more complex. “The pressures on us to intervene now are enormous,’’ the senior White House official said. “But, the day after you do something, the pressures go in the other direction. In Libya, the day after we intervened, all the pressure went from ‘Why aren’t you intervening?’ to ‘What did you just do?’ ”

Late last year, during a visit to Lebanon, I stood near the Syrian border and watched one of Assad’s gunships strafe a group of rebels who were attacking a government outpost. The explosions were thunderous, close enough to rattle the ground. One of the fighters, a commander who called himself Abu Bakr, later told me that his men were badly outgunned. “They are being slaughtered,’’ he said. I asked him what he needed to prevail. “Take away the helicopters,’’ Abu Bakr said. “If you take down the helicopters, I guarantee you, Assad will fall in one month—one month.”

This is a common argument among the rebels, and among the members of the Syrian political opposition, a fractious coalition of exiles that has little presence inside the country. In March, Moaz al-Khatib, the opposition’s president, prevailed on Obama to use Patriot missiles to set up a no-fly zone over rebel-held areas in northern Syria. The goal would be not just to disable Assad’s Air Force but also to remove his Scud missiles—an arsenal, estimated at several hundred rockets, that he has increasingly been using against civilians. “Ending the massacre in Syria is the responsibility of the international community,’’ Khatib declared.

President Obama has told his aides that he is appalled by the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria, and that he would like to do something—even something domestically unpopular—to stop it. Yet in public he has said repeatedly that an American military intervention would be a mistake. “The notion that the way to solve every one of these problems is to deploy our military—that hasn’t been true in the past, and it won’t be true now,” he said at a press conference in 2012. In an interview this year with The New Republic, he suggested that intervening in Syria would oblige the United States to intervene anywhere there was a humanitarian catastrophe. “How do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?’’ he said. “You hope that, at the end of your presidency, you can look back and say, I made more right calls than not and that I saved lives where I could.”

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Above all, the President has said privately, he doesn’t believe that the United States can achieve much by military action in Syria, a fractured country with a tumultuous political history. “We have to have humility about our ability to determine what’s going to happen in a place where people are dealing with very deep-seated grievances and sectarian divisions,’’ Rhodes told me. Assad’s sect, the Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, has dominated the country’s military and its government for decades, though it constitutes only fourteen per cent of the population. Sunni Muslims, an oppressed majority, make up seventy-five per cent, with the rest a mixture of Kurds, Christians, and smaller ethnic groups. As the war has accelerated, Syria’s powerful neighbors have been drawn in, each backing its own proxy on the ground: Iran and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, behind the Alawites; the Saudis, the Qataris, and the Turks behind the Sunnis. A wider war threatens, with fighters from across the Islamic world flowing in to Syria to abet the most radical elements of the rebellion.

At times, Obama’s caution has isolated him within his Administration. In February, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. McCain said, “I would ask again, both of you, what I asked you last March, when seventy-five hundred citizens of Syria had been killed. It’s now up to sixty thousand. How many more have to die before you recommend military action?”

“We did,’’ Panetta said. McCain turned to Dempsey, who also said, “We did.” They were referring to a covert proposal to supply weapons to the rebels, which was also supported by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, and the C.I.A. chief, David Petraeus. The proposal had been presented to Obama, and he overruled it. McCain told me that he was astonished: “There may be another time in history when a President’s entire national-security team recommended a course of action and he overruled them, but if there is I’m not aware of it.”

With the rebels mounting attacks throughout the country, the President’s professed objective has been unchanged: a negotiated settlement that removes Assad from office. The Administration is providing nonlethal aid, like food and medical supplies, to the rebels, and substantial assistance to the Syrian political opposition. Contrary to its own rhetoric, it is also secretly providing limited military support. According to American and Middle Eastern officials, C.I.A. operatives are training small numbers of Syrians to train other rebels, and are passing on time-sensitive intelligence that the rebels can use to attack Assad’s forces. For months, the President has hoped that this strategy would break the stalemate on the ground and force the regime to negotiate. Now, with growing pressure on Obama to react to reports of chemical weapons, his aides say that they are considering providing greater support, including military hardware. “We are on an upward trajectory,’’ the senior White House official told me.

Still, Obama has said that he is worried that arming the rebels will have unintended consequences: a genocide against the Alawites; weapons falling into the hands of Islamist extremists, as happened when the U.S. armed Afghan jihadis in the nineteen-eighties; or a rapid political collapse that demolishes the state’s institutions. “If we’re not careful about who gets weapons, we’ll be cleaning that up for years,’’ the senior White House official told me. “We saw that movie in Afghanistan.”

The President’s reluctance has prompted harsh criticism, and even accusations that he has acquiesced in a mass atrocity. McCain told me, “Everything bad that they said would happen if we intervened has now happened—because we didn’t intervene.” In the Washington Post, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor and former State Department official under Obama, wrote, “Standing by while Assad gasses his people will guarantee that, whatever else Obama may achieve, he will be remembered as a President who proclaimed a new beginning with the Muslim world but presided over a deadly chapter in the same old story.” If he did not intervene, she added, “The world would see Syrian civilians rolling on the ground, foaming at the mouth, dying by the thousands while the United States stands by.”

The President’s critics find his passivity especially galling in light of the epochal—and popular—change sweeping the Arab world. “In foreign affairs, he seems risk averse, in using force and even diplomacy,’’ Rubin said. “There are no big diplomatic initiatives. There is little peace effort in the Middle East. There is no peace effort between Azerbaijan and Armenia—there are no big peace efforts anywhere. We used to have a whole part of our foreign policy we called America as Peacemaker. We don’t do that anymore.”

Part of what seems to rankle Obama’s critics is the sense that he is reducing the country’s commitments to suit what he regards as its reduced stature. “I think he believes that America’s touch sullies other lands, and particularly lands in the Third World,” Fouad Ajami, a Middle East scholar who has written bitterly about Obama’s reticence in Syria, told me. “There is a mistaken impression of Obama among many people that he is an idealist; they miss the realism at the core of his foreign policy.’’ He added, “Bush believed that freedom is a human calling. Obama doesn’t believe that.”

Other proponents of intervention offer a more pragmatic reason for getting involved: that it would hurt Iran. Syria is Iran’s closest partner in the Arab world, and, according to American and Middle Eastern officials, Iran’s leaders are mounting an enormous campaign to keep Assad in power. Members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and its élite branch, the Quds Force, are training and assisting the Syrian forces, as well as airlifting in large amounts of arms. In February, a senior commander of the Quds Force was killed in Syria. “The Iranians are all in,’’ the American intelligence official told me.

Syria also provides Iran with a crucial land route into Lebanon, where its allies in Hezbollah are based. According to American officials, Hezbollah, too, has sent fighters to aid Assad’s forces. Although Hezbollah has refused to acknowledge its role in Syria, several of its fighters have been killed there. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, recently hinted that overt military action was possible, promising that Syria would be protected by its “real friends”—Hezbollah and Iran. “The fall of Bashar al-Assad would be the greatest blow to Iran in twenty-five years,’’ McCain said. With Iran apparently working toward a program of nuclear arms, he suggested, an intervention was not just a matter of humanitarian interest but also one of national interest: “In all honesty, we’re not talking about the Congo here, we’re not talking about Rwanda, tragic as those were.”

Obama has three basic military options: to erect a no-fly zone; to arm the rebels; and to try to disable Assad’s chemical weapons. Proponents of a no-fly zone say that it would not just protect civilians but also allow a new government to flourish. The members of the political opposition are sitting in Cairo, far from the rebels they purport to lead, and they can’t return without inviting bombardments from the regime. Advocates say that a no-fly zone would allow them to cross the border into rebel-held territory, where Western governments could channel money through them, enabling them to begin to govern. “You set them up, and then you deliver tangible assistance to the people on the ground through this opposition council, so that they would have authority,’’ an American aid worker in Washington told me. (He asked not to be named, because intervention had become so divisive in his organization.) “You deliver things through that leadership that make fighters and civilian authorities on the ground dependent upon that leadership. Right? That’s how politics works. They will respect your authority if that is where they have to go for money and weapons.”

Senior U.S. commanders have indicated that they are capable of setting up a no-fly zone, probably with bombs, missile strikes, and anti-aircraft missiles. “If asked to do something, we absolutely have the capability,” General Dempsey said in a House Armed Services Committee hearing in April. Even in Obama’s own party, people have speculated that he missed the opportunity for effective action. “Imagine if, in the beginning of the war, the United States had done a no-fly zone,’’ Rubin told me. “Assad can’t fly helicopters, he can’t fly his planes, and the United States is engaging militarily on the side of the rebels. I think that would have cracked the regime. Or come awfully close to cracking the regime and caused waves of defections.”

Obama has told his aides that a no-fly zone would require a much larger military operation than its proponents believe. “A no-fly zone is not a simple endeavor in Syria,’’ Rhodes told me. The country’s air defense, which was designed to repel Israeli attacks, is one of the densest in the world, replete with radar and surface-to-air missiles. In Obama’s view, the logical way to set up a no-fly zone is to destroy much of this network, in addition to taking out the planes and the helicopters. Such an operation would likely kill many people on the ground, and possibly endanger American servicemen.

Another concern is that, as in Libya, grounding enemy planes and helicopters will not end the majority of civilian deaths; artillery and Scud missiles appear to be killing far more people than planes are. “In Syria, the regime-controlled areas are interspersed with the rebel-controlled areas, so a no-fly zone is not going to stop the killing,’’ Rhodes said. “Once the violence became sectarian, you can’t cover every neighborhood from the air.” In this view, a no-fly zone would be only the beginning of U.S. involvement. “What happens when the rebels keep losing?’’ a senior defense official told me. “What happens when civilians keep getting killed? They will ask us to do more. And we’ll already be in. We will be invested in an outcome. Pretty soon, we’ll be striking ground targets.

On April 10th, a man calling himself Abu Mohammad al-Julani posted an audio recording on YouTube in which he pledged the loyalty of his organization, known as the Al Nusra Front, to Al Qaeda in Iraq. “We look forward to bringing back Allah’s rule to his earth,’’ he said. Al Nusra, the most radical of the Syrian rebel groups, announced its formation in January, 2012, when six senior members of Al Qaeda in Iraq were dispatched to Syria. According to a Middle Eastern official, a number of them had worked as lieutenants for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed by a U.S. air strike in 2006 after directing a campaign that killed hundreds of Americans and Iraqi civilians. “They just moved over to Syria,’’ the official said. To better insinuate themselves into local society, they adopted Syrian-sounding names.

In barely a year, Al Nusra has grown into the strongest rebel group, with several thousand fighters carrying out operations in every region of the country, marking their territory with a black banner, like the one used by Al Qaeda in Iraq, that reads, “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.” Intelligence officers say that Al Nusra’s leaders have learned from the mistakes they made in Iraq, where Al Qaeda’s bloodlust so alienated Iraqis that they turned to the Americans, splitting the insurgency. According to the Senate aide, Al Nusra’s leaders have not tried to kill or intimidate tribal leaders in Syria’s rural areas, as they did in Iraq, but instead are paying them off, while keeping their extreme beliefs to themselves. “They are coming in and making common cause with the Sunni tribes in the eastern part of Syria,’’ he said. “They got smoked in Iraq, and they have learned a lot.” The group has become popular enough to support itself mostly through private donations. Its growth is a result of its success, the Senate aide said. Al Nusra’s fighters are brave and committed, and the group has a sophisticated media arm that broadcasts videos of their exploits, which have included suicide bombings and executions of Syrian prisoners. In Aleppo, the group has replaced failed civil institutions: its members run the police force, the power station, and a Sharia court, which has sentenced people to lashings. At one point, it announced its own no-fly zone over the city.

A large proportion of the rebels’ matériel is provided by Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia: rockets, guns, and millions of rounds of ammunition, often bought in Croatia and shipped to rebel bases on the Turkish and Jordanian borders. At a congressional hearing in April, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the United States was not arming the rebels but was “coördinating very, very closely with those who are.” Officials in Washington told me that they believe the weapons have begun to tilt the balance in favor of the rebels.

In recent months, with urging from the U.S. and its allies, a large number of the estimated seventy thousand rebel fighters have been brought together under a joint military command, a coalition of thirty armed groups, which American officials imagine as a nascent national army. The joint command, based just inside Turkey, is led by General Salim Idris, a high-ranking defector from Assad’s regime. Proponents of greater aid for the rebels have suggested that arms and money be sent through Idris, to solidify his command. A senior American official who works on Syria policy said that approximately half of the money now flowing to the rebels goes through the joint command, and that Idris has begun to coördinate operations. “This is a war of attrition, and the government is losing,’’ the official said. “It doesn’t mean it is going to collapse tomorrow, but the trend lines are negative.”

Obama has made clear, however, that he has little confidence in the rebels, arguing that they are ideologically fractured, that the rebellion lacks a coherent structure, and that individual groups would be impossible to control and would probably fight each other. Some of the guns, he believes, could ultimately make their way to Islamist groups. Idris has pointedly excluded some extremists from the coalition, including Al Nusra and another collection of hard-line Islamist groups, the Syrian Islamic Front. (Al Nusra, for its part, never asked to join up.) But, according to American officials and nongovernmental groups that work in the region, the overwhelming majority of the rebels are fighting for an Islamic republic. Al Nusra, like the other Al Qaeda affiliates, wants to do away with the Syrian state altogether and reëstablish the Islamic caliphate. “The Islamists are the majority,’’ Elizabeth O’Bagy, an analyst for the Institute for the Study of War who has travelled to rebel-held areas several times, said. The small number of non-Islamists among the rebels are often socialists, she told me, and are referred to by their peers with an English word: “hippies.”

In April, Dempsey reversed his position on giving weapons to the rebels, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee that he was no longer sure the United States “could clearly identify the right people” to arm. “It is actually more confusing on the opposition side today than it was six months ago,’’ he said. The rise of Al Nusra has made it seem increasingly possible that what comes after Assad will be a regime led by hard-line Islamists or, perhaps more likely, a bloody fight for power among various rebel groups. C.I.A. operatives have begun helping more moderate rebels conduct operations against Al Nusra, according to an expert on the region.

The Middle Eastern official told me that the Saudis had coöperated with Turkey and Qatar to supply arms but stopped last year, largely because they were worried that guns were going to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group. Some evidence suggests that arms have gone to extremists. In April, Al Nusra posted a propaganda video online. According to O’Bagy, the video shows the fighters holding Croatian-made weapons identical to those covertly shipped to other rebels only weeks before. “We can direct the arms, to a certain degree, but once they are inside Syria we’ve essentially lost control over how they are used,” she said.

American officials have tried to make sure that sophisticated weapons—particularly, portable anti-aircraft missiles, often called by their military acronym, MANPADs—do not leak out. Rebel groups have managed to get them anyway, in some cases by acquiring them from Qaddafi’s old armories. The American intelligence official told me that rebels have an estimated thirty shoulder-fired missiles, and that they have used two of them to shoot down Syrian helicopters. These kinds of missile “would have a huge impact’’ on the war in Syria, the White House official told me, but would be nearly impossible to secure after the conflict ended: “If a U.S.-made MANPAD were ever used to shoot down an El Al jet, I imagine some members of Congress would be having a hearing on that subject.”

According to the Middle Eastern official, the Saudi government has a plan to arm the rebels with surface-to-air missiles, and the Americans appear willing to sign off on the plan, but only if they receive assurances that the missiles will be tightly controlled. The Saudis were growing impatient, he said: “They want to bring down Assad and deal with the consequences later.” The shoulder-fired missiles are considered to be potentially decisive, not merely against Assad but against the regime’s Iranian supporters, with whom the Saudis are engaged in an intense struggle for regional domination. “The Saudis will wait for the Americans, but not forever,’’ the official said.

Last fall, according to the American intelligence official, members of the shabiha, Assad’s brutal militia, were trained in the use of chemical weapons. If the shabiha mounted a chemical attack, he said, the regime would have “plausible deniability.” The militia members, who number about a hundred thousand, are loosely supervised, and they do not wear uniforms. In December, American officials spotted what they believed was a more direct threat: preparations to load bombs containing sarin onto airplanes. The White House approached Russian officials, who contacted Iranian officials, who passed a warning to Assad, and the regime restrained itself. “I’m convinced that they would have used chemical weapons in a very indiscriminate way,’’ Gary Samore, Obama’s former adviser on weapons of mass destruction, told me. Samore said that the sarin bombs, which typically contain huge quantities of agents, are probably still primed for use. “Sarin is a binary weapon; once it’s mixed, you can’t unmix it,’’ he said.

Assad’s chemical-weapons program is dauntingly hard to eliminate by military force, Samore said. “All the options are horrible.” The weapons facilities are dispersed across dozens of sites. “It’s such a vast program, and many of the facilities are close to civilian areas,” he said. Bombing the facilities could result in many civilian casualties and the release of clouds of deadly chemicals. And there is no guarantee that a bombing campaign would destroy all the sites. “What do we do then?” he said.

Another option is to seize the facilities—an even more difficult prospect. American troops would have to fight their way to the sites, possibly battling not only Assad’s government but also various rebel groups, including Al Nusra. “You would have to get in there, secure all the sites, and defend yourself,’’ Samore said. “Assad would have absolutely no reason not to use whatever chemical weapons he had on us.” One Pentagon plan estimated that securing Syria’s chemical weapons would require as many as seventy-five thousand troops—more than the U.S. had in Afghanistan when Obama took office.

Assad is undoubtedly aware of how hard it would be to disable his chemical weapons, Samore said. As his regime comes under more pressure, it is increasingly likely that he mount a larger attack, or that the weapons will fall into the hands of extremists. “One way or another, the risks of there being a pretty large-scale use, with a much larger number of civilian casualties—it’s almost bound to happen,’’ Samore said. “Like it or not, we will probably have to do something.”

In March, Robert Ford, the U.S. Ambassador to Syria, appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to talk about the crisis. In 2011, he had infuriated the Assad regime by showing up at the peaceful demonstrations that marked the beginning of the uprising. He left the country later that year, after pro-government mobs attacked the Embassy and his motorcade. Before his posting to Syria, Ford served in Iraq, where he worked to rebuild the institutions that collapsed after the American invasion. The process took years.

The American experience in Iraq loomed over Ford’s testimony in the House. In city after city from which Assad’s forces have withdrawn, he said, the institutions of the state—police, banks, providers of water and electricity—were imploding, presaging an even worse humanitarian catastrophe if the regime falls. “We do not want to see the Syrian government disappear,’’ Ford said. It “will create more refugee flows; it will help the extremists. . . . That is our biggest concern in terms of maintaining unity and keeping Syria from being an operating base for terrorist extremists.”

Obama wants to see Assad go, but he is terrified that, if it happens too fast, a vacuum could open up—like the one in Baghdad in 2003—and be filled by Islamist extremists. Indeed, Assad appears to be encouraging this outcome; by shelling civilian areas that have been taken over by the rebels, he has rendered them ungovernable. “It’s brutal, but it’s ingenious,” Joseph Holliday, the former Army intelligence officer, told me. “If you’re a civilian in Syria, and the rebels take over, then Assad’s guys roll in and bombard your neighborhood, and you are forced to leave your home and go to another neighborhood—and then, when that neighborhood gets bombarded, you move again. Your life is totally miserable. The result is that, in some places, like in Hama, where the government has come back in, people have said, Thank God they’re back.”

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Like Ford and Holliday, Obama is concerned above all that the United States not precipitate another Iraq—a failed state, with a radicalized population, that will take years and cost thousands of lives to rebuild. Much of the aid that the White House is supplying to the opposition is intended to provide the rudiments of civilian infrastructure in liberated areas, including electrical generators and Internet connections. But the President’s critics argue that the United States needs to become more deeply involved with rebel groups, so that it has allies in Syria. The U.S. has few friends it can call on to gather intelligence, secure chemical weapons, or even provide a welcome to American troops in the event of a military operation; after Assad falls, there is little guarantee that the new leaders will be sympathetic. McCain told me, “If you believe—that’s one the Administration and all of us agree on—that Bashar al-Assad’s departure is inevitable, then every day that goes by this conflict will get harder, and the harder it’s going to be to clean up when it’s all over.”

Still, Obama’s aides argue that nothing will prevent the war from continuing after the regime falls. Along with the shabiha, Assad has mobilized the Popular Committees, a nationwide militia made up largely of minority groups loyal to the regime. Both forces—together with Assad’s regular Army, of about seventy thousand active soldiers—appear prepared to continue fighting if the rebels take Damascus. White House officials and intelligence experts say that much of the post-regime planning is being done with the help of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah; they, too, are prepared to fight on after Assad.

According to the most common prediction of the war’s eventual end, Assad will lead Syria’s Alawites to an enclave on the Mediterranean coast, which includes the major ports of Latakia and Tartous, where the Alawites predominate. American officials say that Assad is trying to lay the groundwork. The regime has ethnically cleansed several Sunni-majority villages on routes that lead to the coast. And, according to the American intelligence official, the regime appears to be stockpiling weapons and supplies in the area. Perhaps most suggestive is the tenacity with which it has held on to the city of Homs, which lies on the highway between Damascus and the coast. Homs would give an Alawite rump state unimpeded access to Hezbollah, and to Iran. “Homs is the key,’’ the official said. “If they can hold it, then they can have the Alawite enclave on the coast that’s linked to Hezbollah and backed by the Iranians, and the Russian ships could still come into the port.” It was in Homs that American officials spotted the regime training the shabiha in the use of chemical weapons.

Joshua Landis, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oklahoma, who has written extensively about Syria, doubts that the Alawites will be able to build a state on the Mediterranean—“Assad’s enclave of evil,’’ he calls it—though he expects that Assad will destroy Damascus in the attempt. Instead, he says, the capital will likely fall to a newly empowered Sunni majority, who will undertake a large-scale expulsion of Alawites from the country. “When this is over, you are not going to want to be an Alawite in Syria,’’ he said. “Once the Sunnis take power, they are going to want the coast, and right now the Alawites have it. The elegant solution, for them, is ethnic cleansing. It’s elegant because the alternative is killing all the Alawites. The Sunnis will pick one little town, maybe two, and kill everyone. The rest of the Alawites will not stick around and wait to see what happens. They will all go to Lebanon.”

In May, the senior American official who is involved in Syria policy met me at his office in Washington. When I asked him to predict Syria’s future, he got up from his desk and walked over to a large map of the country which was tacked to his wall. “You could have a situation where the more secular rebel groups could well be fighting the more Islamist-oriented groups,” he said. “We are already getting that in places like Deir ez-Zor, in the east. In Aleppo, they fight each other.” Pointing to an area near the Turkish border, he said, “We see fighting between Kurdish and Arab militias up in the north.” Elsewhere, there were Druze militias, members of a small religious community most often associated with Lebanon. “They have had some clashes with the Free Syrian Army. And here is my favorite. Christians are now setting up their own militia.

“What does that sound like? Lebanon. But it’s Lebanon on steroids.” He walked back to his desk and sat down. “The Syria I have just drawn for you—I call it the Sinkhole,’’ he said. “I think there is an appreciation, even at the highest levels, of how this is getting steadily worse. This is the discomfort you see with the President, and it’s not just the President. It’s everybody.” No matter how well intentioned the advocates of military intervention are, he suggested, getting involved in a situation as complex and dynamic as the Syrian civil war could be a foolish risk. The cost of saving lives may simply be too high. “Whereas we had a crisis in Iraq that was contained—it was very awful for us and the Iraqis—this time it will be harder to contain,” he said. “Four million refugees going into Lebanon and Jordan is not the kind of problem we had going into Iraq.” In a year, he estimated, Lebanon alone could have four million refugees, doubling the population of the country. “Jordan will close its borders, and then you will have tens of thousands of refugees huddling down close to that border for safety.”

The rapid growth of Al Qaeda in Syria is deeply troubling, he said. “In February, 2012, they were tiny. No more than a few dozen. Now, fast-forward fourteen months. They are in Aleppo. They are in Damascus. They are in Homs.” In Iraq, he said, “They didn’t grow so fast and they didn’t cover all the big cities. In Syria, they do.” Also, he pointed out, there were no chemical weapons in Iraq, as there are in Syria. “We will have a greater risk, the longer this goes on, that the bad guys—they are all bad guys, but I mean terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Islamist extremist groups—will acquire some of these weapons. How do you plan for that? The longer the war goes on, the more the extremists will gain.” Indeed, the longer the war goes on, the greater the threat that it will engulf the entire region.

The official said that the United States’ quandary was clear enough: “Iraq was a searing experience—to see our kids out there, out on those checkpoints, and they don’t speak Arabic, and they don’t know what the fuck is going on around them. I know there is a debate on military intervention. I cannot recommend it to the President unless there is a very clearly defined political way back out. People on the Hill ask me, ‘Why can’t we do a no-fly zone? Why can’t we do military strikes?’ Of course we can do these things. The issue is, where does it stop?” ♦